I request your permission to include extract from Poemhunter: Night Music by Philip Larkin We will use subsequent editions of the above-referenced book, in all media of expression now known or later developed, and in all foreign language translations and other derivative works published or prepared by Mystar Education & Business Solutions (Pty) Ltd or its licensees, for distribution throughout the world, and also in versions made by non-profit organisations for use by blind or physically handicapped persons.

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I request your permission to include the attached extrac from poemhunter: Title: Night-Music by Philip Larkins.We want to use this and all subsequent editions of the above-referenced book, in all media of expression now known or later developed, and in all foreign language translations and other derivative works published or prepared by Mystar Education & Business Solutions (Pty) Ltd or its licensees, for distribution throughout the world, and also in versions made by non-profit organisations for use by blind or physically handicapped persons.

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Poetry is like trying to remember a tune you've forgotten... A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision.....he juggles with sounds and associations which will best express the original vision. It is done quite intuitively, sometimes esoterically, sometimes with a very common touch. That is why the poet never thinks of the reader. The vision has something to do with sex. I don't know what it is; it's subtle, elusive, indefineable. It's not surprising, obviously two creative forces in alliance, closely connected.

The result is a poetry of self-indulgence, the patter of the entertainer, fodder for future social historians from a poet who needs emotional isolation, from a poet who touches our hearts by showing his own, who reveals the paradoxes and enigmas of our lives by putting his own on the table, who provides, for me, perspectives on unity that emerge out of aloneness and solitude. -Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, St. Martin 's Press, NY,1995, p.21.

He pursues self-definition,
the nature of identity,
through separateness,
exclusion and difference,
negative self-definition,
a voice of Englishness
back in that ninth and
early tenth stage of history1,
after the loss of imperial power,
diminished influence and, yes,
a new value to English experience.

A remorseful tone, secular
but communal and telling,
not untrue, not unkind and
on the margins, exposed to
the beyond, imprisoned in a
personality, something hidden,
something he has been given,
reticence-English privacy ethic:
where difference merges into
absolute unity; where special
uniqueness and loneliness are
clarified as oneness, endless
continuities and discontinuities.

Ron Price

1 1953-1963-ninth stage of history; 1963-1973-first ten years of the tenth stage of history. Larkin did not write 'many poems after 1973.'(ibid., p.164)
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Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new- Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I...

Wild Oats

About twenty years agoTwo girls came in where I worked -A bosomy English roseAnd her friend in specs I could talk to.Faces in those days sparkedThe whole shooting-match off, and I doubtIf ever one had like hers:But it was the friend I took out,